Real Stories: The Boy Who Tried To Kill Trump

In June 2016, 20-year-old British man Michael Sandford was arrested at a Donald Trump rally, after trying to take a police officer’s gun to shoot the then republican presidential nominee. Michael immediately found himself at the centre of a media storm and at the mercy of America’s notoriously harsh justice system. How did a young, middle class boy from suburban England, who suffers from Asperger’s, end up thousands of miles from home? What drove him to attempt to kill one of the most powerful men in the world?

This programme follows Michael’s family as they travel to the US for his sentencing, unsure of when they might see him again. Set against the backdrop of Trump’s remarkable rise to the White House, the documentary explores Michael’s complex past while using exclusive eye witness interviews and never-before-seen archive to piece together the elaborate assassination plot and attempt to find out why he did it.